The Road

People tend to make too big a deal about whether or not the book was better than the movie. To me, there's really no comparing the two. Just because they tell the same story doesn't mean they can be looked at in the same light. A movie is asked to do a lot of things a book never has to think about. A book can drone on and on, get lost, go off on tangents, and as long as the writing is crisp enough, all the filler is perfectly fine. In fact, some people even find it commendable. There's something to be said about cranking out a 1000+ page novel. Movies get far less leeway. Like truly good fiction, everything in them has to have a purpose. There's simply no time to include anything that doesn't shove the story along. And of course, these restrictions also tend to leave the most memorable scenes in a book on the cutting room floor when the final draft of the movie is made.

But for the sake of doing this assignment, I'll make a decision. I thought the movie was much better. As a story, I didn't find either particularly strong in the first place, but in the book, much of the scenes seemed almost cosmetic. Yes, each one helped shape our opinion of the man and the boy, helped us connect with them, and humanized them. But what needs to be remembered here is that it is a narrative. There needs to be action. The story has to be building towards something. It has to go somewhere. Don't ask me how a story about two people following a road fell short of that, but it did.

Surviving in a world like the one described in the book is as monotonous as it is difficult. The scenes in the book start to blend together for me as more time is put between me and the day I polished off the last page. Heck, maybe the familiarity from scene to scene was even intentional. McCarthy could have been trying to beat us down so that we were more able to sympathize with his characters. Intentional or not, I found it quite unpleasant.

This is where the movie outshines the book. By its very nature, the movie sets out to cut all the fat. Yes, we're made to be dragged along the road with the man and boy, but it's not quite so repetitive. There's much more variation in the scenery. There's even more conflicts and characters. While a lot of people will harp on the fact that these things were not true to the original vision of the story, I'm just grateful that my second journey down the road wasn't completely the same as the first.

Like a lot of adaptations, this movie wasn't able to avoid the need for a voice over. Some ideas just take way too much time to be conveyed with traditional movie methods. Not everything can be shown to us. That's the great part about books, the author can tell us exactly what he/she wants us to know. I'm not disappointed at all that they had to resort to voice over for a lot of the thoughts that they ripped out of the book. I prefer it that way. Voice overs may seem like cheating to some movie buffs, but I'm actually a sucker for them.

Overall, I think the movie did an awesome job of staying true to the book. I'm not sure if I think that's a good thing, but I'm sure it's what they wanted when they set out to make it, so in that way, it's a smashing success. Really, it's hard to even contrast the two. The few changes that were made to the story were so trivial that they hardly even mattered.

So again, if I had to pick one over the other, I'd pick the movie simply because it was more compact, but in reality, the two were remarkably similar in their mediocrity. There's no real story here, just a setting. The characters don't influence their surroundings; they merely try to survive them. This is not the type of novel I'd set out to read on my own, but it was a good experience anyway. I hope next year's book/movie has more substance.